It's around. I forget where I found it. Allegedly there is a SPARC version, but I only have the PA-RISC release. It also comes with Outlook Express. It seems to be a true Trident layout engine, not the Tasman engine that IE5 for Mac uses (which I rather liked back in the day).

There is supposedly a Service Pack for it I haven't found yet that fixes bugs and adds 128-bit encryption (5.01 SP1).

I've got the SPARC version of IE here, although I've never actually gotten it to run. (That was possibly just a corrupted download.) I view it as a novelty more than anything actually useful. From what foetz says, that was the case back in the day, too!

I've never seen the HP-UX version in action until today. Thanks for sharing the pics. Especially since they're of a PA-RISC laptop! Rare hardware running rare software is as good as it gets.

To be sure, if you've used one RDI/Tadpole of that era, you've really used them all. From the front my SparcBook and PrecisionBook are almost indistinguishable. I'm sure the AlphaBook (which I still need to find one of) is no different. But the power supplies, maddeningly, are all different.

However, it arrived somewhat damaged, and although I attempted to repair it with a replacement board and soldering on the new rework for the ports, it never lived. It's in pieces in storage until I figure out what to do with it.

At least on this machine, it's not bad -- it's certainly better than Netscape, and even though it's just a 160MHz PA-7300LC, essentially a C160L in a laptop case, it runs it quite well.

MS used MainSoft's MainWin porting tool to port the normal Windows IE, so it should work exactly the same. I tried the SPARC one way back when, I seem to remember finding a fake C drive hierarchy in IE's settings directory (like what Wine creates)

Sigh... I was briefly the very proud owner of a fairly rare (and quite expensive) maxed out RDI PrecisionBook 180. Sadly, in between me paying for it and it arriving to me, someone at a postal depot in San Francisco seems to have decided they'd prefer to take it instead. The annoying thing is that after taking it, I'd imagine they probably tried to work out how to install Windows Vista/7 on it, failed [what, no built-in CDROM drive!], and then chucked it out.